My definition of a top team would be a team with a car that can win races on pace. So that would include the Lotus cars of 2012 and 2013. I would therefore omit Bottas from that list. That Williams is not a race winning car unless things go wrong for others. It was Mercedes and Red Bull last year, Mercedes and Ferrari, in Vettel’s hands at least, this year.

Honestly? My answer would be Alonso. He deserves more than two titles. Other that that, Hulkenberg. I have always been underwhelmed by Bottas.

I thought I’d do a little comparison about the relative dominance of RBR vs Mercedes. People say Vettel had a dominant car in 2011 and 2013, but it was really only dominant in his hands. People can question whether or not Rosberg is a better driver than Webber.

The fan car wasn’t immediately banned as goes the story. They would have let it compete for the rest of the season before banning it for the year after. But as Cristian says, Mr Ecclestone had bigger goals than just winning GPs at that time. This excerpt is from “Lunch with… Gordon Murray” which can be found on the motorsportmagazine.com.

Then, in a major deal by Ecclestone, Cosworth power was replaced by Alfa Romeo’s flat-12 for 1976. The Italian engines were heavy and thirsty, and the BT45 never won a race, although in BT45B form in 1977 John Watson had several strong drives, culminating in a near win at Dijon. For 1978 the BT46 included another Murray innovation, surface radiators – thin panels disposed along the sides of the monocoque to reduce frontal area – but the car overheated.

Gordon’s solution was sensational: the BT46B fan car. This had a conventional radiator mounted horizontally over the engine, cooled by a gearbox-driven fan at the back of the car. The engine bay was shrouded and sealed by flexible skirts running on the track, so that not only was the radiator fed with air but also the car was sucked down onto the ground, giving hitherto undreamed-of levels of downforce. Two BT46Bs appeared at the Swedish GP at Anderstorp in June and, to the consternation of every other team, Niki Lauda ran away with the race.

“The car was legal as the rules stood then. Article 3.7 said: ‘Any device whose primary function is to have an aerodynamic influence on the performance of the car has to be firmly fixed.’ So I had to ensure that more than half of the air was cooling the radiator. After the race the FIA sealed the car in the truck at Anderstorp and then came to the factory with an anemometer. They got us to run the engine, and measured the flow of air through the fan and through the radiator. They found that 60 per cent of the air was for cooling and 40 per cent was for downforce. Not its primary function, you see. So the FIA wrote to us and said, ‘The car is legal, but it’s using a loophole in the regulations. In next year’s rules we’ll close that loophole, but you can use it for the rest of the season.’

“But Bernie – I didn’t understand this at the time – had his eyes on bigger things. He was working on getting his foothold in the Formula One Constructors’ Association and launching himself towards what he’s doing now. He reckoned the uproar was in danger of collapsing FOCA completely. So he asked me – he didn’t dictate – he asked me to fit normal radiators to the car. I was very pissed off, but I agreed.”

The 2012 Williams is an interesting case because at some tracks Maldonado was genuinely quick. He qualified in the top six on six occasions, and in the top three on four occasions. However during the races he often had incidents or bad reliability (in Singapore for example) that meant he didn’t score anywhere near as many points as he should have done. And Bruno Senna was just consistently slow during the whole season. We can only wonder what was the true potential of that car if Williams had had a real top class driver.

@bullfrog The ’84 Monaco Grand Prix is the famous half point race won by Prost, where Ayrton Senna and Stefan Bellof were both catching before the race was red flagged.
Keke Rosberg won the ’83 Monaco GP, but that was in the Williams FW08C which still had the normally aspirated Cosworth engine. Keke did win in the car you describe at Dallas ’84 though, so it is still a good candidate!

@fastiesty Interesting link. I see someone mentioned the Benetton B195 there. Now the car won the driver’s and constructor’s championships in ’95 so it was clearly fast, but I have read before that the handling of that car was pretty poor and that it was an extremely difficult car to drive. Obviously not the worst Grand Prix winning car, but maybe the worst title winning car? If you look at onboard clips of Michael Schumacher from that time he is really wrestling the car, and it does not look easy to drive at all. Gerhard Berger famously said the ’95 car was undriveable when he joined Benetton for ’96.

The Ferrari ‘Cadillac’ that Gilles Villeneuve won two races with in 1981 is definitely a good candidate.

Surely no underdog collection would be complete without mentioning Gilles Villeneuve winning at Jarama in 1981 in a Ferrari that was more a tractor than a racing car. Although it had a powerful engine.
For championship underdogs then look no further than Kimi winning the title in ’07 and Prost in ’86.

Lewis Hamilton was very unlucky in 2012. He ended up only two points ahead of Button in the standings, but that does not represent the quality of his driving that season.
Vettel was unlucky in 2010 despite winning the title. As fans I guess we were lucky he suffered some bad luck. If his car had been more reliable he would have won the title a lot more comfortably.